Useful Beauty

On the relationship between beauty, sustainability and use

I’m Tim Gorichanaz, and this is Ports, a newsletter about design and ethics. You’ll find this week’s article below, followed by Ports of Call, links to things I’ve been reading and pondering this week.

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Design a teacup that can and will be used every day for at least 100 years.

This is a classic exercise from the EcoDesign Foundation (which, so far as I can tell, doesn’t exist anymore—a cruel fate for an organization focused on sustainability) that I learned about in a short 2003 essay by design theorist Cameron Tonkinwise. Think through it with me.

You might start by thinking about materials. Things that last—steel, aluminum, titanium. Perhaps you’d research new materials that haven’t yet been widely commercialized. Something super strong or perhaps even self-repairing. Maybe you’d think about materials that are resilient and unbreakable, like rubber.

Then maybe you’d think about form. Cups break when they’re dropped, so you’d consider shapes that help prevent dropping. Indentations for the fingers, grip pads, secure handles or straps.

Following this line of thought, you might realize that cups don’t usually break while you’re drinking from them, but rather when you’re washing them. Tonkinwise points this out, and my own life of breaking cups in the sink also matches it. So perhaps you’d design not just a cup but a machine to wash this special cup in such a way that the cup cannot break. Going further, why not design the human right out of the cup-using experience by creating a robot that will lift the cup to the lips?

Now you might backtrack and realize none of this would be very pleasant. Looking back at the prompt, you need to design a cup that can and will be used every day. Aesthetics matter, then, because otherwise no one would use it. And on that note, it shouldn’t be trendy, because who knows how tastes will change over the decades. So it must be timeless, a classic.

Perhaps you’d look now for examples of 100-year-old teacups we still have. And interestingly, many of them are not made of special durable materials at all but are incredibly fragile. Beautiful and fragile.

A silver-gilt mounted chalcedony teacup, 17th Century. Courtesy Burghley.

So maybe that’s a route: make the teacup so beautiful and fragile that humans will be moved to take extra good care of it.

And in that way it wouldn't be just beautiful or fragile but usefully beautiful—the kind of beautiful thing that is actually used and in being used becomes more beautiful. Think of the ritual of the tea ceremony, which is itself a beautiful spinoff of beautiful things, the teacup one among many of them.

Beauty, Sustainability and Usefulness

This brief design exercise led us to an unexpected conclusion: that making something last doesn't necessarily mean making it durable. Rather, it could be the opposite.

There’s growing concern with sustainability, and we tend to assume that just means something that can last a long time. But sustainability really always means sustainability-in-use. After all, some plastics apparently never decay, but we wouldn’t call them sustainable.

So when we talk about sustainability in products, we mean a product that will last a long time and be used along the way, and so it also must be beautiful enough that people will want to use it along the way, even as tastes change.

A New Sense of Beauty

Tonkinwise writes that our everyday understanding of beauty today has a dual origin: on one hand, from Plato’s idea of meditating on the eternal—beauty as something transcendent—and on the other hand, beauty as something pleasing to look at but ultimately useful, which Tonkinwise attributes to Kant.

But better, Tonkinwise says, is to take an approach offered by 20th-century philosophers such as Heidegger, who would say that beauty is achieved when a thing is so useful that it seems to disappear into an activity and we don’t notice it as a thing. Think about when you’re writing with a good pen. You’re just writing. You only notice the pen when it isn’t working right.

This is the kind of beauty we should be most interested in design. It’s highly resonant, too, with the remarks of Christopher Alexander, which I’ve written about here previously, to the effect that beauty and usability spring from the same source.

It’s not a static kind of beauty, but rather, as Tonkinwise puts it, it’s beauty-in-use. It’s an active kind of beauty, one that unfolds in time and perhaps is only felt after the fact.

Tonkinwise says that beauty-in-use is experienced as gratitude:

The pleasure of beautiful use must be the sort of devolved pleasure that comes from a sense of accomplishment. It is not a Platonic-Kantian appreciation of beauty, but nonetheless still an appreciation. Rather than being pleasing, it is a thankfulness. One thinks of the designer, invariably anonymous, who made possible this cup of tea, and thanks him or her that there is this thing, where there could be have been nothing.

It is because this unmetaphysical judgement of beauty-in-use takes the form of giving thanks, that it is active, returning the favour by taking the form of care. Its retroactivity is what allows it move it from contemplation to preservation and extension.

This reminds me, first, of Elaine Scarry’s point that beautiful things prompt us to protect them (hence she sees a connection between aesthetics and morality).

But it reminds me too of another insight of Heidegger’s: that thinking is ultimately thanking, both inextricable from being human. Heidegger points out that in Old English, to think and to thank were closely related. Even today the words are only one letter apart. “Original thinking is the thanks owed for being,” Heidegger writes.

To think, Heidegger says, is to be attentive to the world around us, to care for it, to appreciate it, and to express thanks to it in every living moment—thanks because in every living moment the very stuff of existence is being revealed to us, “the way of being of beings,” as Heidegger puts it.

And to really think in this way, I think, is also to see the useful beauty all around.

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Ports of Call

This weekend I’m out in the Pennsylvania Wilds running 100 miles. If you’re reading this on Saturday, you can see where I’m at in the race’s live tracking. Not much on this week, but here are a couple things I happened across:

• An Attack Vector: I was fascinated to learn about a new method for stealing data: analyzing sound. Researchers were able to create an AI model that can log keystrokes (that is, infer what you’re typing, whether it’s a password or a private message) just by hearing the sounds of typing as broadcast over a Zoom call.

• Balenciaga: A new episode of the Founders podcast profiles Cristóbal Balenciaga, famed mid-20th-century fashion designer. Compared to what that brand signifies today, it’s almost night and day—except the luxury and expensive part.

Thanks for reading! Have a good week.